


Nothing but the Two of Us

by GhostClimber



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Cherry finally understands stuff, Domestic Fluff, Joe is a cutiepie, Love Confessions, Love Triangles, M/M, Matcha Blossom is even stronger now, Not Beta Read, we get crushed in the face with a skateboard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29982807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GhostClimber/pseuds/GhostClimber
Summary: Cherry has just been defeated by Adam and goes to the only safe place he knows: Joe's arms.The night will help him understand a lot of things.
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe & Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom & Shindo Ainosuke | Adam, Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom, Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom & Shindo Ainosuke | Adam
Comments: 7
Kudos: 78





	Nothing but the Two of Us

The tingling of the glasses woke Cherry up enough to allow him to hear Joe's words, but it took him a while to regain that minimum of lucidity to raise his head, which he absolutely couldn't recall putting on the table.  
-Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.- Joe said, accompanying the sentence with a tender smile and a sip of wine.  
-Don't mock me, I'm tired as hell.- Cherry replied, still too tired even to manage to come up with a bit of sarcasm. He took his glass, raised it and Joe hit it with his, even if he had already toasted alone.  
It was always like this, with him, even if he looked like an ignorant gorilla he was so good at heart, one of those enlightened human beings that always manage to bow down to pick up the pieces of the lost souls.  
Cherry drank a small sip; even if he knew that alcohol wasn't to be drank with the medicines, he needed it a lot.  
-You would have won, Kaoru.- Joe said, and Cherry looked at him even if his neck didn't exactly agree with his movement. But Joe was staring at his glass and didn't look back at him, yet he went on: -He wouldn't have needed to do what he did, if it wasn't so. But he knew you were going to win.  
-Stop it, Kojiro. You well know that Adam wins whatever the cost. He always does.- Joe didn't answer. Cherry wondered whether he really believed what he said, or if it was merely an empty word of encouragement, made embarrassing by the fear he had surely felt seeing him going down after Adam had hit him.  
Cherry knew that Joe loved him.  
Somehow, in his own way, he supposed he loved him back, but even if they regularly had sex Joe had never said anything aloud and Cherry had never done anything to provoke him: they bickered all day long, but Cherry wasn't so stupid to put himself in a situation from which a question would emerge, a question that would have been too difficult to answer honestly. And Joe didn't deserve a half truth, Joe deserved the truth as a whole, but Cherry was still pondering about it, since years before. And that night, while he was lying on the S with his face in pain and his heart in pieces, he had thought that maybe he could manage to understand his own feelings.  
-Come, Kaoru.- Joe said, interrupting his stream of thoughts, -Let's go to bed.- Cherry had no time to ask him how the hell was he supposed to go upstairs when he was in a wheelchair. Joe bent and picked him up bridal-style. Instinctively, Cherry put his arms around his neck, thinking about how many times he had held him close, about how much pain they had inflicted each other, he more than Joe, and about how that damn idiot with three times the muscles that were necessary to a human being had always been that something that rooted him to his own existence.  
And he, too busy pondering about a past that wasn't going to magically start again from where it had stopped, had never noticed.  
He let himself being put on the bed and he stood still while Joe undressed him, gently so not to cause him any harm. Cherry looked at him; he was a bit blurry because he had already removed his glasses. He waited for him to bend and ask for a kiss and when it didn't happen he felt lost. He looked up with effort, ignoring his neck's protests, to try to understand what Joe was doing; he saw him taking two t-shirts out of a drawer and put one up. He then went to him, once in a lifetime without any kind of mockery, and helped him put on the other: his smell was all over it, and it was drunkening.  
Cherry fell asleep without even noticing.

When he woke up, Joe was cocooned in the curve of his side.  
He wasn't touching him, not precisely, but the heat coming from his body created some strange kind of warm nest under the blankets.  
Nevertheless, Cherry wasn't feeling at ease.  
He wanted more, more than the body that Joe gave to him, more than the love he gifted him without asking for anything in exchange except a few mockeries and some rare serious conversation.  
Him mind ran to Adam, Adam as he was when they were young and they had the world in their hands. But the pain he always greeted his memory with was different.  
Cherry frowned, trying to understand what he was feeling; Joe switched position in his sleep and his hand brushed Cherry's hip, then it grabbed his t-shirt.  
That sight filled Cherry with tenderness: it almost seemed like Joe's body looked for his one even when his mind was unconscious, as if to him it was impossible to feel anything but the two of them.  
Cherry stared at the dark ceiling and tried to focus on Adam, chasing away the quick question asked by his own mind: “Why are you doing this?”.  
It had been so good, living together through the small battles of their teenage years, holding on to each other, pretending that life would always be that way: obstacles that were apparently impossible to overcome that were being crossed just with their will, always hand in hand, always running away together and then laughing about the escape.  
But life was so much harder than they could think as boys, life had teeth and those teeth were sharp, and they bit, ripped, destroyed the flesh and crushed the soul every day. And life also had a voice of honey, that in the heart of the night, when everything is silent and no one can hear you scream, volumes up, clear and seductive, to explain you why, even if you did everything at your best, even if you gave your all, you're nothing more than a failure, a grown man who just can't deliver himself from his inner Peter Pan and so he keeps his hair long and goes skating in the evening against boys, instead of leaving them to have fun on their own, cruelly implying that their future will surely allow them to keep some time to grow their passions, making them believe that every obstacle will just be a pile of skateboards set on purpose to see who's the one who manages to jump over them with the highest jump.  
Still, Adam's memory was not painful anymore, just bittersweet.  
Cherry remembered the sensation he had felt seeing him in front of himself, his feet on the ground and his skateboard in his hand. He could have drifted him, with Carla's help, but until the board hadn't smashed on his face he hadn't believed that Adam was really going to do it.  
He had not believed he would, not for a second.  
And instead he had, and the still open cut that Cherry brought on his chest and that bear his name had split, letting out everything that was infected. It had spurred everything, while Adam covered him with insults, while Cherry realized that he had been a complete idiot for all that time: he had fooled himself, until the very last second, that Adam's sad glance was a sign of remorse, he had even imagined to speak with him after the beef and hearing him say he was sorry, but Adam had destroyed those last remains of hope that Cherry had grown, like a goofy housewife would do trying to get a house plant to survive without a single ray of sun.  
He had taken him, for the umpteenth time, taken him and crushed him, and if Cherry hadn't been smart enough to get the message the first times, now he sure was.  
He knew, he didn't think it was just a lie he was telling himself, that behind Adam's behaviour there had to be a big sorrow that he had never wanted to speak of; he was sure that the drastic change in his behaviour had been some kind of defence towards the friends that he didn't want to get involved in his problems, but every thing had a limit not to be crossed, and with his evil move at the S Adam had crossed him with both feet.  
Cherry moved an arm to caress Joe's hair.  
Their relationship, apart from the total lack of communication about their mutual feelings, had always been clear and honest, maybe sometimes brutal but never liar.  
They bickered every day, more than once a day, for the most futile reasons, but they also were always able to let down their defences and speak when the matter was serious. Their bad moods didn't last long, not because they weren't important ones, but because they accepted to share their weight.  
Closing in himself, Adam had denied himself the opportunity of healing and had denied them the opportunity of helping him. God knows how many times Cherry had gone looking for him, even knowing that he would find nothing but arrogance, evilness and, sometimes, violence. And God knows how many times he had tried to tell himself that maybe this time he had done one step forward, that maybe he had managed to scratch the surface, that maybe if he insisted he would find a way to enter his soul, to heal him, and then to enjoy their renewed friendship as a prize for his perseverance.  
But now it was over for good, Cherry told himself.  
Adam hadn't hit him too hard: he knew him enough to know that, if he had wanted, he could have smashed all the bones of his face. But it had been hard enough to convince Cherry that that door had been closed, maybe not forever and maybe not for everyone, but surely for him.  
He wasn't going to come back to knock again.  
He wasn't going to sacrifice himself on the altar of Adam's pain, whatever it was.  
He wasn't going to live with the purulent cut of their past relationship: he was going to bury it, and if sometimes his memory would come back knocking he was going to seek refuge in Joe's arms.  
Joe.  
Kojiro.  
Suddenly, Cherry knew what it was that was still troubling him: he chased Adam away from his mind, too tired now to regret anything but the time he had wasted trying to help someone who didn't want to be helped. Inside him there was only a vague numbness, like the one that occurs when the stomach gives up on something it can't digest: what remains is just the tiredness for having puked, a bad taste in the back of the mouth and the contracted stomach, but nothing else, the pain goes away. Maybe a bit of irrational remorse at the thought of having wasted some food, nothing more.  
He shook Joe, calling his name: -Kojiro.  
-Kaoru, what's up? You feel bad?- he answered as soon he focused. A different cut, clean and neat, opened in Cherry's chest.  
Unable to put together the words he felt he had to say, he brushed himself against Joe's body, appreciating his solidity, but he was refused: -Kaoru, don't ask me that.  
-Why?- Cherry asked. Joe got up a bit, leaving his side but remaining close.  
-Because you're more crushed than Humpty Dumpty and I weight a ton. You almost can't move and if I topped you I'd hurt you. As soon as the doctors tell you that you're not held together with spit anymore, I promise we'll do it all night long.- Cherry didn't answer, but he cocooned against his large chest.  
A superficial sleep caught him while Joe's arms hugged him with a delicacy that no one would ever suspect from such a muscular man.

-“I heard she sang good songs, I heard she had a style... and so I came to see her, to listen for a while...”- Joe's baritone voice came from the bathroom beside the bedroom, barely audible over the sound of the shower. It was his habit to entertain the soap bars and the shampoo bottles with a concert every morning, and the rare times when Cherry had stayed for the night he always woke up at the sound of him singing.  
Unexpectedly, instead of being a rap freak or something ignorant like that, Joe had a passion for swing, in particular for Frank Sinatra, whom he had the discography of. Cherry waited for Joe to finish his shower, listened to his movements behind the door and wondered how he could have been so blind for all his life.  
-Oh, you're awake. How are you?  
-You could fuck me unconscious, tonight, and you know it.- Cherry replied. Joe turned his back to him and opened his closet. Acidly, he said: -I'm not Adam.  
-I know that you're not him.  
-Then, don't ask me to hurt you.- Joe stopped, then he whispered: -You can ask me everything else. But not to hurt you.  
-I love you, Kojiro.- Cherry said, and his words came out exactly the way he thought they would: fluid, soft, warm and right. Joe abruptly turned around and stared at him, astonished; on his neck, a vein was pulsing at a suicide speed and his cheeks were red.  
-What did you say?- he whispered.  
-I said that I'm in love with you.- Joe got to the bed, grasping the door of the closet as long as he could, then he fell on the mattress beside Cherry, who went on: -You don't have to say anything at all. I just thought you had to know.  
-Kaoru...- Joe lied beside Cherry and took him in his arms, in silence. Cherry fixed his position to be more comfortable and leaned his forehead against his chest.  
That was the difference, he said to himself.  
Joe didn't ask for anything, but he always accepted whatever Cherry had to offer. He was always ready to lend a hand to help a friend to get up, and if he had been at Cherry's side for so long, even if he knew he still couldn't hold his soul, but merely his mind and body, it was because he had made his defences fall, he had come in and he had made himself a home. And he didn't even have to make an effort. He had just done it, he simply knew what to do and he did.  
There was all the difference: it wasn't a matter of hiding, of spasmodically looking for another method of attack, it was a piece of the puzzle that entangled with no efforts with his companies, lines and colours and shapes completing each other naturally.  
It was just being there.  
-Why now?- Joe asked, -Why, after all this time? Are you... is this a revenge against Adam?  
-No, it isn't. It's just that I managed to close that door.- Joe hesitated, as if he was trying to understand if Cherry was telling the truth; Cherry could feel him almost digging in his mind, as if he could read his most hidden thoughts. He stood still, losing himself in his embrace, completely sure of his own honesty, finally free.  
-I love you too, Kaoru.- Joe eventually said, then his chest moved up and down in a series of quick, superficial breaths. Cherry held him tighter, not minding the pain in his back, which he had hit so badly against the ground the night before.  
What mattered was only Joe, only Kojiro and that feeling that had had no need for desperate cures to stay alive; nothing else in the world could matter a mere second of that freedom that they finally could start experimenting in each other's arms, without anything really changing. They weren't going to stop bickering and mocking each other, and they weren't going to stop knowing each other so well that they almost could read the other's mind, they weren't going to stop sharing bottles of wine and stupid jokes and their passion for skateboarding.  
But they had definitely stopped saying goodbye to each other leaving a door so carelessly opened.


End file.
